Google Wave may be the future, but the future is not "Real Time"

Real Time is so noisy, it's stomped on the Wave of the future.

At the Real Time Crunchup today in San Francisco, there's a ton of talk about Twitter, of course, and also the social networks and the way that they all work together. There have been a series of presentations from companies that have solutions that fix some subset of all the long list of annoyances about using those tools.

Facebook was basically prodded into announcing that it would share its lists of friends, and so we should see a bunch of applications that compare lists.

Some of them try to connect the networks all together, some make it easier to see what all the linking is all about.

There are others, and they are all worth a look, but they are all fixing things that shouldn't be broken in the first place. If I want to reply to a tweet and have everyone know which tweet I am replying to, well, I should be able to. The reality now is that I can't in any meaningful way without giving up most of my 140 characters.

I keep waiting for Wave to fix all this. And it may.

But it's not right now. Not even close.

I would like to be able to report that Wave worked successfully as a backchannel of communication for the Crunchup conference, but it did not, at least before the lunch break.

Last week it worked very well as a backchannel for the Defrag Conference. Now I was able to attend that one in person, so I'm sure that made a difference, but the theory of Wave, especially with a conference being webcast free around the world, is that lots of people could join in to create a living document that would be part transcript, part links and discussion, and part creation of a new form of communication.

Maybe I just didn't do a good enough job of publicizing that the wave existed, but I think the reality is that Defrag was much more of a show about the future of the web, really looking forward. Because of that it had more people interested in Wave; interested in trying it and thinking about it, even though it has tons of bugs and a funky UI.

The Real Time Crunchup, however, is Twitter-like. It's about what's happening right now. Most of the conversation from the stage that I've been able to catch is about what's already happening, what people are doing. There have been presentations from companies who hope to be the future of socially connected communications, but not one of them has the economic or intellectual heft to be considered a true vision for the future.

Even as big as Twitter is now, it's still essentially a feature within the larger scope of communication, and may grow or may just fade away like the hula-hoop. I really don't know. I do know that Twitter has the lucky coincidence of history in that it is perfectly meshed to the way our brain hands out rewards for broadcasting our own version of micro-celebrity status.

Wave really has an opportunity to fix so much of what is broken in communications, and it still may, but here in Real Time, it's being written off because nobody is using it.

That lack of use is an important fact to know right now, but I think that it is being shortsighted to say that Wave won't be the future because it's not being used now.

You are welcome to join the Wave I started about the Real Time Crunchup (if you are in Wave now) by clicking here.

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